As families across the country navigate the pressures of finding and affording child care, new research from Vanderbilt University’s Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center examines what that landscape looks like in greater Nashville, Tennessee
Nashville, Tennessee – Families across the United States are struggling to find and afford child care. Policymakers, advocates, and researchers have documented the scope of that struggle at the national level for years. What has been far harder to answer is a simpler question: what is happening in any given community?
A new five-part research series from the Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center (Policy Impact Center) at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of Education and Human Development provides that kind of local understanding for greater Nashville, Tennessee.
Conducted in partnership with United Way of Greater Nashville, Raising Readers Nashville, and the Nashville Early Education Coalition, the Davidson County Child Care Landscape Study draws on an original survey of licensed child care programs across greater Davidson County, Tennessee, conducted in summer 2025. Nearly half of all reachable licensed child care programs in the region participated. The study finds that the greater Davidson County child care system faces interconnected challenges in child care supply, workforce stability, and affordability.
Supply: The region does not have enough child care slots, and infant care is especially scarce
Greater Davidson County’s 246 licensed child care centers offer approximately 22,184 total child care slots for children under age 5, enough to serve just over half of local working families with young children. At the time of the summer 2025 survey, 88% of surveyed centers reported waitlisting or turning away at least one child in the previous six months because of lack of capacity. Within that already constrained supply, 10% of slots are allocated to infants.
In 2024, approximately 10,645 infants were born in Davidson County. The licensed center-based system has the capacity to serve approximately 1 in 5 of them.
Licensed home-based child care offers almost no additional relief, representing approximately 1% of all licensed child care slots in the region and operating at nearly full capacity.
Workforce: More than 4,000 early childhood educators support the region’s licensed child care centers, and most cannot afford to live on what those programs pay them
Approximately 4,226 early childhood educators work across greater Davidson County’s licensed child care centers. The average center pays educators an estimated $18.15 per hour.
In Davidson County, the ALICE Household Survival Budget Threshold, the estimated minimum hourly wage a single adult needs to cover basic necessities without assistance, is $22.50 per hour. Approximately 91% of local early childhood educators earn below that threshold.
Fewer than 3 in 5 centers offer health insurance or retirement plans to full-time educators. More than half of centers (57%) experience high annual turnover, defined as losing at least 20% of educators in a given year. When asked what would help reduce turnover, 75% of child care directors pointed to the same answer: increasing pay to ensure educators earn a living wage.
Affordability: Families are paying as much as the market can bear, and it still is not enough to sustain a high-quality system
Using a locally tailored cost estimation model, the Policy Impact Center estimates the true monthly cost of high-quality center-based child care in greater Davidson County at $3,457 per child for infants, $2,726 for toddlers, and $2,214 for preschoolers.
These are not the prices families are currently being charged. They are what the research estimates care should cost to be both high-quality and financially sustainable for providers, including paying educators a living wage. Using infant care as an example, at the 75th percentile of current market rates, families pay $1,645 per month, leaving a potential gap of $1,812 per infant per month.
A single parent earning the Davidson County median household income of $51,792 would need to spend 80% of their annual income to cover child care for one infant at the estimated true cost of high-quality care.
Additional scenarios for families with more than one young child are explored in the briefs.
These three challenges do not exist in isolation. Limited child care supply can create severe challenges for thousands of local working families who depend on stable, full-day child care to remain in the workforce. Because tuition rates cannot reflect the estimated true cost of high-quality care without putting child care out of reach for many families, programs face significant constraints in what they can pay educators, what benefits they can offer, and how they can sustain financially viable operations over time. As a result, child care programs often struggle to remain financially solvent as they simultaneously work to meet the needs of families, educators, and young children in the region.
The full findings are presented across five research briefs and an executive summary
- Davidson County Child Care Landscape Study: Executive Summary
- Brief 1: Early Education for the Next Generation: Understanding Child Care Supply
- Brief 2: The People Behind Early Care and Education: Understanding the Early Childhood Workforce
- Brief 3: Limited Providers, Limited Slots: An Analysis of Home-Based Child Care
- Brief 4: What High-Quality Center-Based Child Care Really Costs, and Why No One is Paying It: Insights from True-Cost Modeling
- Brief 5: Estimating the True Cost of High-Quality Home-Based Child Care: Insights from True-Cost Modeling
- Methods Appendix
About the Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center
The Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center is a nonpartisan research center at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of Education and Human Development that provides state leaders with clear, evidence-based policy solutions to improve the lives of young children and their families. For more information, visit pn3policy.org.
Press Contact
Sydne Lewis, 615-343-9946, sydne.lewis@vanderbilt.edu
